OK, a bit of hyperbole in the morning. One of the goals of RDF is to create the Semantic Web, an interwoven network of data seamlessly linked by shared identifiers and shared vocabularies. Everyone uses the same identifiers for the same things, and when they describe these things they use the same terms. Simples. Of course, the reality is somewhat different.

I've been spending a lot of time recently mapping bibliographic citations for taxonomic names to digital identifiers (such as DOIs). This is tedious work at the best of times (despite lots of automation), but it is not helped but the somewhat Orwellian practices of some publishers. Occasionally when an established journal gets renamed the publisher retrospectively applies that name to the previous journal.

Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’ Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.

The Encylopedia of Life (EOL) has been relaunched, with a new look and much social media funkiness. I've been something of an EOL sceptic, but looking at the new site I think I can see what EOL is for. Ironically, it's not really about E. O. Wilson's original vision (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)00040-X: We still lack a decent database that does this.

Browsing Mendeley I found the following record: http://www.mendeley.com/research/description-larva/. This URL is for a paper which apparently has the DOI doi:10.1645/GE-2580.1. This is strange because Zootaxa doesn't have DOIs. The DOI given resolves to a paper in the Journal of Parasitology : Now, this paper has it's own record in Mendeley. OK, so this is weird..., but it gets weirder.

Some quick half-baked thoughts on citation matching. One of the things I'd really like to add to BioStor is the ability to parse article text and extract the list of literature cited. Not only would this be another source of bibliographic data I can use to find more articles in BHL, but I could also build citation networks for articles in BioStor.

Following on from my previous post on BHL apps and a Twitter discussion in which I appealed for a "sexier" interface for BHL (to which @elywreplied that is what BHL Australia were trying to do), here are some further thoughts on improving BHL's web interface. Build a new interface A fun project would be to create a BHL website clone using just the BHL API.

As part of a project to map taxonomic citations to bibliographic identifiers I'm tackling strings like this (from the ION record urn:lsid:organismnames.com:name:1405511 for Pseudomyrmex crudelis ): Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and Tachigali-inhabiting ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 126(4), August 1999: 451-540.

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.

Last week I was at the NSF "Assembling, Visualising and Analysing the Tree of Life" Ideas Lab, run by KnowInnovation.com/. It was an interesting experience, essentially a structured week of brainstorming ideas. One thing I came away with is the feeling that our notions of the "tree of life" are fuzzy, contradictory, and often probably unobtainable.